North River IT

10/22/2026

Your compliance, user data, and community trust depend on proactive cybersecurity.

Our next-generation network, data, and mobile security products are backed by the strength of machine learning and AI to proactively predict, identify, and stop threats in their tracks, in, at, and around your network perimeter, including the cloud.

Protecting your company’s most sensitive assets hinges on your ability to continuously monitor for threats and respond immediately if an issue is detected.

10/20/2026

What's the wildest thing you've ever discovered with a reverse image search?

For California geologist Brigid Lynch, it was a mastodon tooth.

While out doing fieldwork, she spotted something strange sticking out of a creek and thought it could be an animal. “I was like, ‘Do you think we should touch it?’” she told the New York Times.

She took a photo instead, ran it through Google's reverse image search, and got a pretty surprising result: it might be an Ice Age mastodon molar.

A paleontologist later confirmed it was, in fact, a Pacific mastodon tooth.

We tend to think of Google image search as a way to find the source of a picture, track down a product, or figure out where we've seen something before.

We don't necessarily think of a scientist in the field using it to help figure out what she's looking at.

But that's one of the fun parts of having all these tools and technologies at our disposal: seeing the unexpected ways people put them to work.

Sometimes, you just need to know what you're looking at.

What's the strangest thing you've ever reverse image searched?

10/15/2026

Nothing sounds better than zero complaints.

Especially when the people using your technology already have plenty of other things to worry about.

When the network is slow, the Wi-Fi drops, or a system stops working, IT hears about it.

Our goal is different: technology that works so reliably, nobody has to think about it.

No tickets. No workarounds. No “is anyone else having this problem?” messages.

Just technology doing its job in the background while your team gets on with theirs.

That’s what good infrastructure should do: less disruption, more time to focus, and, ideally, zero complaints.

10/12/2026

Your district's security doesn't stop at the edge of your network.

This spring, cybercriminal group ShinyHunters breached edtech platform Canvas, claiming to impact 8,809 educational institutions and steal approximately 275 million records.

The incident is a reminder that strengthening your own security posture is only part of the equation. Your vendors can concentrate risk, too.

And your district isn't going to stop using SaaS tools. So what can you do?

A few key steps, highlighted in a recent EdTech security article:

Know what you have. Build and maintain a SaaS inventory—including classroom tools and browser applications—and understand how they connect to your environment.

Know what your vendors are doing. Ask about their security and privacy certifications, risk-management frameworks, and how they protect your data.

Tier vendors by risk. Understand what student data each tool can access, particularly when regulated or sensitive information is involved. Scale back access where you can.

Address security early. Build security requirements into RFPs and contracts whenever possible.

Plan for an incident. Include vendor-related scenarios in your incident response and broader resilience planning.

You can't eliminate every third-party risk. But you can reduce your exposure, limit the impact of an incident, and be better prepared to keep your district operating when something goes wrong.

10/07/2026

When network infrastructure and budgets fall out of sync, risk builds and your community’s confidence erodes.

Schools and municipalities are expected to deliver more within drawn-out refresh cycles and tight budgets.

That creates visibility gaps, aging infrastructure, and growing strain on your teams.

Take the Network Infrastructure Health Check: https://hubs.li/Q04sQRvR0

10/05/2026

Fat Bear Week may be over, but we’re still thinking about it.

With congratulations to this year's winner, #89 Backpack, who was your favorite bear?

There’s something pretty satisfying about watching these bears spend their summer doing exactly what they need to prepare for their long winter’s nap.

10/01/2026

What happens to your networks when your community’s population multiplies overnight?

For Juneau, Alaska, summer cruise season can bring as many as 16,000 cruise passengers into town in a single day.

The resulting cellular congestion created problems that went well beyond slow connections.

Parking kiosks that worked reliably in the winter could stop functioning in summer. Point-of-sale systems failed. Even basic voice calls became difficult to connect.

The City and Borough of Juneau needed a way to handle that seasonal demand without putting even more pressure on its technical team.

And as Director of CBJ Chris Murray noted, the objective was to create a seamless experience: “This would not work if people were dealing with complicated passwords. Passpoint was key.”

The solution was a continuously managed public Wi-Fi network, designed and deployed with the City, using enterprise-grade wireless networking technology.

Today, it supports more than 103,000 unique users during peak cruise season and has helped eliminate connectivity complaints—without adding operational or ladder work to the City's technical team.

Read the full case study to learn how Juneau did it, and what other communities and organizations can learn from its approach:

See how the City + Borough of Juneau offloaded 20–30+ TB of cellular traffic and eliminated connectivity complaints with Northriver IT + Cambium Networks.

09/29/2026

One of the biggest questions we hear about co-managed IT is: “what does this mean for my internal IT team?”

The answer: it shouldn't mean replacement.

Co-managed IT is about extending the team you already have, not replacing it.

Your internal team keeps ownership of strategy, institutional knowledge, and oversight, while your partner MSP adds capacity and expertise where it's needed.

That might mean helping with help desk volume, monitoring and cybersecurity, cloud and infrastructure management, or providing an experienced perspective on a strategic or niche project.

Every team is different, so the partnership can look different, too.

But the goal is simple: give your internal team more support, more capacity, and more room to do the work only they can do.

09/24/2026

Cybersecurity threats keep getting more sophisticated. But year after year, report after report, many breaches still start with a very human mistake.

It only takes someone rushing through their emails at the end of the day, or stressed by an urgent request that appears to be from the superintendent, for something to slip through and quickly domino unseen.

School districts are a top target, protecting sensitive data with constrained security budgets and time-strapped teams.

That very human vulnerability can also become a strength.

Fortinet found that 67% of organizations implementing security awareness training have seen a reduction in intrusions, incidents, and breaches since starting.

And in a recent EdTech Magazine story, Appleton Area School District's Director of Technology Services Scott Werfal shared that the number of staff who mistakenly click on links in phishing simulations has dropped 60% since they began their training program three years ago.

The keys? Make training ongoing, and make sure it's championed from the top.

A client came to us after a breach so devastating that it took weeks to bring their systems back online. Some employees even had to cancel planned trips to deal with the fallout.

A breach doesn't just disrupt systems. It disrupts people's lives and the communities those systems are there to serve.

That's why security awareness matters.

09/23/2026

Cars zoom past workers all day on road and highway improvement projects.

When you're exposed to the same hazards over and over, it's easier to become desensitized to them. And on a busy road work site, a split-second lapse in defensive focus can have devastating consequences.

According to OSHA, one in four “struck by vehicle” deaths involves a construction worker.

That's what caught our attention about this research from Texas A&M.

Researchers are exploring how AI, virtual reality, wearable technology, and augmented reality could help workers recognize hazards and respond to them more effectively. They're even looking at how AI could help personalize safety training based on how individual workers perceive risk.

We work with construction companies, and we're constantly reminded that this is a much more technology-driven industry than it's sometimes given credit for—just as Texas A&M Assistant Professor and researcher Namgyun Kim points out. AI is simply adding another layer to a transformation that's already well underway.

And when technology can help someone recognize a hazard a split-second sooner, the potential impact goes well beyond productivity.

Worth the read in Construction Dive:

“VR- and AI-based safety training should not be viewed as an experimental technology anymore,” said Namgyun Kim, assistant professor in construction science at Texas A&M University.